Nandini Dhar

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Nandini Dhar’s poems have appeared or is forthcoming in Muse India, Kritya and Sheher:Urban Poetry by Indian Women. Nandini grew up in Kolkata, India, finished her M.A. In Comparative Literature from University of Oregon, and is now a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at University of Texas at Austin.

inking the hyacinth

knowing how to make

the rosemary smell

like thyme is not enough.

herbrother told her. with a touch on her forehead,

which, he thought, would reassure her. if she really

wants to be the kabiyali she thinks she is, she must

learn how to make pearlsfrom inside her spleen.

and that, he said,

requires perseverance.

amongst other things.

not yet ready to give up, shespent days

sorting through spine splintering brick.

looking for the right kind of dust.

holding the specks

against the sun with

her three fingers.

the other two craving for shades of green

she had never hoped to touch. then, once

she had them all, sheswallowed the dust

drops. one by one. every one of them. not

noticing that her forehead now bears five

glowing blue spots.

exactly on the places where

her brother’s fingers touched her

cantaloupe skin.

probably because, she wasn’t feeling anything there.

almost in the same way the leprosy skin fails to notice

the prick

of a pin

on itself.

in the bread-colored desolation of a machete moon,

shehad to admit that her brother did not want her

to pull out her eyes one after the other and serve them

to him in crystal jars.

marinated in lemon juice, rock

salt and cinnamon flakes. neither

does he want her to spend the day

sweeping speckless the ground under the guava tree

but, being just back from turning an oyster princess

into a porcelain-doll, he believes his assurances can

turn all silhouettes into full-blown

statuettes. she, on the other hand,

would rather scratch the oyster-shells

hardand let the blood dry under her broken nails.

blood, when allowed to harbor chaos on its own, can

become a bladed verb which will pierce a bone right

in two. yet, eager to regale in his desperate certitude,

she gave up the bristles,

the blood,

bones and the blades.

for thirteen years, three months and three days, she made

the hyacinth leaf her bed. fed on air. and woke up every

morning to throw up spit the color of deep brown earth

and sunlit scar tissue. which she would then use to sculpt

rabbits, deer, sparrows and hedge-hogs.

and once she crawled back

into her hyacinth bed, her brother

would break them all. one by one

too ordinary, he would say, with an expert frown. the morning

she spat the pearl out, her brother held her head, picked up

the pearl stone, and after looking at it for two whole minutes

through purple tinted field glass, said, sissy dear, you are yet to learn

the art of madness wild. it was then that she smashed

the pearl on the rock. collected pieces

too pink. andwrapped them up in

her rainbow-skinned scarf, walking off

towards her hyacinth-shield.needless to say, no one

saw her ever again. Nothing much happened to her

brother either. only the white hyacinth flowers, in

the lake, turned fluorescentviolet. and on full-moon

nights, they bleed red. routinely. ritually. without fail.

irreconcilable:lines for virginia mem-sahib

My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. […] A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever.

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

since 1835,

when abhinavagupta, shudrak, and rumi were forced to sit

tight-packed on a single shelf, leaving the rest of the world to alphabets

that jumped out of ships and judge-sahib’s wigs, textbooks have perfected

the art of making crazed scribbling-chicks look tame.

tame enough to be tapestried into buttercream muslin pillow cases

tame enough to be painted on jasmine-white schoolroom walls

tame enough to be talked about without once referring

to that conch-shaped nose of yours

the look in your eyes, which says,

i am perfectly capable of drenching myself

in the purple-blue of a drizzly-day sun, claiming, the sun

belongs to me and only to me, and can,therefore,

be swept away, into the abyss of my purse,

just like the peacock-feather of my hat.

my tongue was daffodil-bruised.

the little man made me peel oranges

for eight hours every day, my ass on wood,

the tip of his beard brushing off the last traces

of elizabeth, mary, all those poet-girls who walked straight

into the smoke-filled coffeehouses, corsets tightly folded into eight

in their armpits.

hell,i didn’t know that even sammy dear

had waved off the sugar-bowl with the back of his left hand while pouring